{"product_id":"i-write-to-find-out-what-i-am-thinking-isbn-9780593992210","title":"I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking","description":"\u003cb\u003eThis second hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights, South and West\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLet Me Tell You What I Mean, \u003c\/i\u003eand her bestselling and most famous work, \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her essay “Why I Write” (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction writing: \"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Across her long and prolific career, readers have been blessed time and again by her brilliance as a prose stylist and a social commentator.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom her unforgettable reckonings with grief (for her husband in \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e and for her daughter in \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e), to her exploration of two iconic regions of America in \u003ci\u003eSouth and West\u003c\/i\u003e, through the indelible pieces of reporting collected from across her career in \u003ci\u003eLet Me Tell You What I Mean\u003c\/i\u003e, the books collected here show Didion at her best: bearing witness to our history, illuminating our culture, and shedding light on the human condition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEveryman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.“Didion is a brilliant observer, a powerful thinker, a writer whose work has been central to the times in which she has lived.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.” — \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e] is a living, sharp, and memorable book. . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality. The result aches with a wisdom that feels dreadfully earned.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“For the great many of us who cherish Joan Didion, who can never get enough of her voice and her brilliant, fragile, endearing, pitiless persona, [\u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e] is a gift.” —\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature.” —National Book Foundation citation, Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American LettersJOAN DIDION (1934–2021) was born in Sacramento, California. She wrote five novels and ten nonfiction books, as well as co-authoring screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, for \u003ci\u003eThe Panic in Needle Park, Play It as It Lays\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eA Star is Born\u003c\/i\u003e, among others. Her memoir \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Introducer:\u003c\/b\u003e GRIFFIN DUNNE is an actor, film producer, and director. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his role in \u003ci\u003eAfter Hours. \u003c\/i\u003eFilms he has directed include \u003ci\u003eAddicted to Love\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePractical Magic, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eJoan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold\u003c\/i\u003e, a documentary about his aunt.from the Introduction by Griffin Dunne\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLife changes fast,\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLife changes in an instant.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eYou sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe question of self-pity.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose were among the first words my aunt, Joan Didion, wrote when she finally returned to her desk on May 20, 2004, after the sudden death, by heart attack, of her beloved husband of thirty-nine years, John Gregory Dunne on December 30, 2003. They are also the words that open \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere had been signs, early indications of impending catastrophe, a dog whistle that John would not live out the year, that even Joan, after decades of marriage, was not attuned to hear. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn had ongoing issues with his “ticker,” as he called his heart. He had undergone a procedure in the late 80s for a weak artery and more recently he’d had a pacemaker implanted (a “widow maker,” John delighted in quoting his cardiologist). But it was his state of mind in his last days, filled with dread and doom, that Joan didn’t take as warning that her husband had an appointment in Samarra.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eI tell you that I shall not live two days\u003c\/i\u003e.” Joan repeats this line of Sir Gawain’s in growing self-flagellation, and with every incantation her cat-o’-nine-tails cuts deeper, as if punishment for ignoring what then seemed obvious while writing \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t think I’m up for this,” John said to Joan on their way home from seeing their only daughter Quintana in the ICU of Beth Israel North, where at that moment she was fighting for her life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You don’t get a choice,” Joan replied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEverything he had done had been worthless, John said hopelessly to Joan the night he died or the night before. His current piece in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e—about Gavin Lambert’s biography of Natalie Wood—was worthless, he said. He didn’t know what he was even doing in New York. “Why did I waste time on a piece about Natalie Wood?” he said, perhaps sensing the precious hours he had left.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This might not be normal,” wrote Joan later, about those hours, “but neither was it normal for a father to see a child beyond his help.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were other signs Joan would later remember: how John said, either three or twenty-seven hours before he died, that detail she didn’t recall, “You were right about Hawaii.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas he talking about that time in the 70s when she wanted to buy a house in Honolulu, and he didn’t? What was driving this sudden regret?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is one of many memories that haunted Joan that year. And as a journalist, she felt compelled to document her loss, not to make sense to the reader, but to herself, so she might understand how grief could toy with her imagination to the point where she could magically believe that at any moment John might walk through the door after his morning stroll in Central Park.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“See enough and write it down,” Joan noted in her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood,” she writes in \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e, thirty-six years later. “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe explored her grief in a submersible built for one, diving into the journal of C. S. Lewis, pulling quotes from Freud, finding passages in Thomas Mann’s \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e, always looking, but never finding anyone who could articulate what she was feeling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDescribing the journey of her grief in my documentary about Joan called \u003ci\u003eThe Center Will Not Hold\u003c\/i\u003e, she said, “The reason I had to write it down, is that no one had ever told me what it was like.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s the first book about grief not by a believer,” the playwright David Hare correctly points out later in the film.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd who thought that journey would become a bestseller, let alone win the National Book Award or be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Didion was no stranger to bestseller lists, but no one anticipated the sheer volume of sales of \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking\u003c\/i\u003e, or the months it would remain aloft.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was on a movie set almost six months after the book’s release. Joan was still on the bestseller list. I noticed a young actress I was working with, nineteen or twenty years old at the most, rush back to her chair and her copy of \u003ci\u003eThe Year of Magical Thinking. \u003c\/i\u003eWhen we wrapped for the day, I casually asked what she thought of the book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“She’s incredible, this lady. My grandmother died last year and I can’t talk to anybody about it.” The young actress stopped to look at the book in her hands, gently running a finger over Joan’s name. “Nobody gets it . . . but she does.” When she asked me if I’d ever read it, I nodded and offered nothing more, not wanting to break the spell by telling her of my relationship to the author.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Do you know,” she began, her face a picture of wonder, “if she has ever written anything else before?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat’s the thing about this book. Until \u003ci\u003eMagical Thinking \u003c\/i\u003eJoan had never had such an enormous audience. More importantly, she hadn’t had an audience that was as young and hungry to discover all she had written before \u003ci\u003eMagical Thinking. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoan was suddenly next-level famous. It wasn’t unusual for people to stop \u003ci\u003eme \u003c\/i\u003ein airports or coffee shops to say in halting voices how much \u003ci\u003eMagical Thinking \u003c\/i\u003emeant to them, that my aunt helped them get over, understand, and accept the loss of their parent, child, or sibling. They somehow knew of my family connection, and by connecting with me could finally express their debt to Joan, even if indirectly. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEvery time I shared these encounters with her, Joan would look at me with an expression somewhere between bafflement and wariness. She was not the kind of person to embrace flattery, at least not on the outside, but I suspect that beneath her unreadable and sometimes intimidating expression lived a quiet amazement that her words had brought comfort to so many.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe one wound Joan couldn’t heal was her own. No amount of magical thinking could distract her from the cold fact that she had outlived first her husband and then, unimaginably, her daughter. This is the story she tells in \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e. Quintana is still alive in \u003ci\u003eMagical Thinking, \u003c\/i\u003ethough just barely. She suffered a brain injury from a fall at LAX two days after John’s funeral. She’d planned to return to Malibu with her newlywed husband, Gerry Michael, to relive the happiest moments of her childhood where her parents had raised her. The brain injury led to complications, each one more dire, until finally, on August 26, 2005, Quintana Roo Dunne died at the age of thirty-nine. Once again, Joan wrote to understand her feelings, but this time, for her next and last book, \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights\u003c\/i\u003e, she wrote to face the unthinkable\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I very nearly didn’t finish it,” she once told me, nervously twirling John’s wedding ring on a delicate gold chain around her neck, “but I went on.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer closest friends were dismayed when they read the galley. Earl McGrath, to whom she dedicated \u003ci\u003eSouth and West, \u003c\/i\u003ealso in this Everyman collection, said to me that he told Joan to her face that he “hated” \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights. \u003c\/i\u003eI asked why he would say such a thing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Because I love her, and she loved Quintana and was a great mother who didn’t deserve the pain she put herself through to write it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoan is very tough on herself in \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights, \u003c\/i\u003eand for anyone who loved her, it was—and is—painful to read. She confronts her mortality—she was no longer afraid to die—and her failing health. She relives happy memories of Quintana as a child running on the beach and the blissful day of her wedding to Gerry at St. John the Divine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way,” Joan writes, but with the caveat: “Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ‘ordinary blessings.’”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOther memories accompany the guilt and regret: at the age of five her daughter called Camarillo Mental Institution to ask what she needed to do if she was going crazy. While examining a childhood photo of Quintana, Joan notices the then-unnoticed signs of melancholia, which prompt brutal introspection:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eHow could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWas I the problem? Was I always the problem?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor \u003ci\u003eBlue Nights, \u003c\/i\u003eshe volunteered for a mission no one asked her to undertake. Rereading the book to write this introduction, I can feel the toll each sentence took on her and the almost Sisyphean struggle it must have been to finish it. She did it for Q. She did it for herself. She did it because as a child of the West, she was raised with the frontier ethic that you don’t leave the dead behind.","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300797534437,"sku":"NP9780593992210","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593992210.jpg?v=1767729743","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/i-write-to-find-out-what-i-am-thinking-isbn-9780593992210","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}